1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring exchanges between a client and a server across a network. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods that read a network monitor trace and rebuild the requests and responses to make the exchanges easily readable to a user by rebuilding entire requests and responses, coalescing chunked information, collecting interleaved packets, reformatting extensible markup language (xe2x80x9cXMLxe2x80x9d) bodies, if present, and optionally removing any hyper-text markup language (xe2x80x9cHTMLxe2x80x9d) bodies from the requests and responses.
2. The Prior State of the Art
The Internet protocol known as hyper-text transfer protocolxe2x80x94distributed authoring and versioning (xe2x80x9cHTTP/Davxe2x80x9d) is becoming the foundation for application development on exchange server technology, which employs a client/server relationship. The HTTP/Dav protocol uses XML to execute requests and corresponding responses between a client and a server across a network.
The requests and responses pass through a protocol stack in order to be transmitted across the network. To provide a more efficient transmission across the network, it is customary for a protocol stack to dissect the request or response that passes through the stack into fragments. The fragments are then incorporated into blocks of data, known as xe2x80x9cpackets,xe2x80x9d which are in the form of long buffers of bytes. The packets are then individually sent across the network connection. As such, and by way of example, a given request sent by a client to a server across a network can comprise many packets.
While standard Internet protocol ensures that the packets of a specific request or response will be properly ordered once received, all of the packets that correspond to a given request or response are not necessarily transmitted together. Instead, the packets corresponding to a request or response are interleaved with packets that correspond to other requests and/or responses in order to optimize the transmission of data across the network.
To further optimize the transmission of data across the network, the data in the body of the packet is frequently xe2x80x9cchunked.xe2x80x9d This means that rather than placing the data into a single buffer, the data is strung together. Therefore, by way of example, if a client communicates a 32-kilobyte request to a server, this request may be chunked into one or more segments that are strung together, each segment being transmitted individually to the server.
The requests and responses exchanged between a client and a server are visible to a network monitor. The network monitor, also referred to as a xe2x80x9cpacket sniffer,xe2x80x9d sees the packets that are transmitted across the network, arranges the packets in the order that they were sent, and creates a trace.
While a network monitor trace is valuable for recording the HTTP/Dav activity, it is a very poor tool for analyzing the activity because it understands neither HTTP/Dav protocol nor XML. The trace displays the network packets as a very unfriendly jumble of bytes in what is known as the frame viewer window, which may provide, by way of example, six columns of text (generally in hex) that is six bytes wide and twenty pages deep. The reading of the trace is further complicated when the data is chunked because the data is all strung together. Furthermore, the reading of the trace becomes even more complicated because of the interleaving of the transmitted packets. As such, upon desiring to read the portion of the trace specific to a given request and/or response, a reader easily confuses data that he/she believes corresponds to the given request and/or response with data that corresponds to other requests and/or responses.
The present invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring exchanges between a client and a server across a network. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods that read a network monitor trace and rebuild the requests and responses to make the exchanges easily readable to a user by rebuilding entire requests and responses, coalescing chunked information, collecting interleaved packets, reformatting XML bodies if present, and optionally removing any HTML bodies from the requests and responses.
Embodiments of the present invention may be practiced in network computing environments with many types of computer system configurations and provide a mechanism that allows for the viewing, interpretation and analysis of, by way of example, a network exchange between a client and a server.
Embodiments of the present invention employ an extendable network monitor, such as by way of example, Full Netmon, to record the exchanges transmitted across a network. The network monitor obtains a copy of the exchange in a network monitor trace that is displayed in a very unfriendly jumble of bytes. The systems and methods of the present invention can call on, by way of example, an executable program module to allow the exchanges to be made easily readable so that the exchanges can be interpreted and analyzed to verify that the requests and/or responses occurred correctly and as expected.
The information when exchanged is sent across a network in packets. The packets are gathered and the source and destination of each packet is identified. The packets are distributed to variable locations referred to as xe2x80x9cbucketsxe2x80x9d for storage. Once in a bucket, the packet information is stored in a buffer until all of the packets corresponding to a particular exchange between a client and a server have been received. Once received, the packet information is processed so that the exchange can be read, interpreted and analyzed. The packet information is then flushed and the bucket is reset and made ready to be reused.
Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by the practice of the invention. The features and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims. These and other features of the present invention will become more fully apparent from the following description and appended claims, or may be learned by the practice of the invention as set forth hereinafter.